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f there’s one thing Hollywood dislikes, it’s originality. Give ‘em a TV show, a remake, a sequel, a computer game or even a theme park ride (‘Pirates of the Caribbean’) and the suits will be happy. That’s because half the marketing has already been done. With a pre-existing fan base, these adaptations are already ahead of the pack in a crowded marketplace. Historically, novels and plays have provided the voracious industry with its main source of material. In some cases, the films have become so iconic they’ve arguably eclipsed their literary origins. Can you think of Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ without picturing Malcolm McDowell in Droog attire? And does anyone actually read Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’ any more? Ismail Merchant and James Ivory built a lucrative industry on literary adaptations, but only while talented Ruth Prawa Jhabvala was writing the screenplays. Austen and Brontë have given rise to flourishing bonnet and corset industries, while providing the National Trust with vital income. And for many years, Ian Fleming’s James Bond single-handedly kept the British film industry afloat. Authors have also benefited enormously from the arrangement, though some haven’t lived to see the rewards. Pity poor old Philip K Dick, for example. He died four months before the release of ‘Blade Runner’ and could hardly have anticipated that in the next millennium his name would become a byword for big-budget, mind-bending science fiction thrillers. Stephen King, meanwhile, must rank as the most adapted living writer. One King novella collection alone (‘Different Seasons’) yielded three films: ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, ‘Apt Pupil’ and ‘Stand By Me’. But it’s not always plain sailing when it comes to literary adaptations. Quite apart from snobbery (The Guardian once produced a list of the best ones which pointedly disdained to include Potter or Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, while finding room for the daft-looking killer plants of ‘The Day of the Triffids’), there’s the problem of reader identification and ownership. Woe betide the film-maker who has the temerity to deviate from the beloved text. The film industry’s rather cynical calculation seems to be that if it’s a book that everyone’s reading on the tube or on holiday, then they’re all going to go and see it anyway. The challenge is to bring in an additional audience and
30 // october 2011
Big Screen Film Adaptions Feature 973.indd 30
From bestseller to the box office (from top): the ‘Twilight’ saga; ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’; ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’; ‘One Day’; ‘The Shining’; ‘The Help’; ‘War Horse’; ‘Elegy’; ‘The Cat in the Hat’; ‘The Beach’; and, most triumphantly, the very silly ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’
then flog them the branded tiein paperback. Frequently, that means casting a star that the good citizens of Buttf*ck, Idaho will recognise. The danger is that neither the star’s fans nor the book’s enthusiasts will respond. Take ‘One Day’, for example. The problem here is that no one who enjoyed David Nicholls’s novel seems to have pictured corn-fed American Anne Hathaway as mousy northerner Emma Morley. While it would be untrue to suggest the film is a flop, it’s been soundly trounced at the box office by ‘The Inbetweeners Movie’ (a TV spin-off, you’ll note), and you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who liked it. Perhaps the most egregious example of this phenomenon is ‘Fever Pitch’. It’s safe to say that nobody ever thought of nerdy, weedy Nick Hornby as Mr Darcy, but that didn’t prevent Colin Firth being cast in the lead role of the film version of Hornby’s autobiographical novel. Incidentally, ‘Fever Pitch’ is a rare example of a popular modern novel that’s been ruined twice. It was Americanised as ‘The Perfect Catch’. Nobody went to see that either. So let’s have a bit of fun with this and consider the worst adaptations. If you’ve the stomach for trolling through the barely literate world of internet forums, you’ll find that just about every film of a book has been branded ‘WORST MOVIE EVAH!!!!’ by someone – even Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ (though that may be author Stephen King himself, who prefers the plodding, if more slavishly faithful TV movie version). One suspects
venuemagazine
9/27/2011 4:47:42 PM